After the mistakes of Russia and Qatar, Fifa is looking for a permanent home
for its tournament but only Switzerland passes all the tests and Scotland
comes up short

No sooner does one World Cup end than embarkation on the long and tortuous road towards the next begins. And so today we give thanks to Fifa’s uncanny prescience that the 2018 event is scheduled to be hosted by the model of modern democracy that is Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

With a measure of doubt continuing to hover menacingly over the 2022 tournament in Qatar, the relief for Sepp Blatter must be intense. The rampant bribery uncovered in the Qatar bid has come, needless to say, as a visceral shock. If we were naive, I guess we were blinded to the possibility of corruption by Qatar’s fantastically rich football heritage and the exquisite aptitude of its summer climate to the strenuous playing of sport.

It is all too easy to be smug with hindsight, of course, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing in the world, and it would be preposterous to blame Fifa for the Qatar fiasco

Even so, it remains such a grave embarrassment to Fifa president Blatter that he must be tremendously grateful for the breathing space afforded him by the blessedly uncontentious selection of Russia for 2018.

Perhaps the sledgehammer irony is unfair. Politicians here and elsewhere in Europe are demanding that the tournament be relocated as punishment for the Malaysian airliner atrocity, and with excellent cause, but when the vote was taken in December 2010, Russia and Ukraine were at peace. The worst that could be said of that award, as if such considerations would weigh on Blatter and his chums, is that Russia is a kleptocracy with a mildly laissez faire attitude to human rights.

What follows is predicated on the transparently false assumption that Fifa gives any more of a damn about plain morality than western states such as France, which means to continue arming Russia; or, as in Britain’s case, deliver pious lectures about the immorality of that while selling billions worth of armaments to such rigorously repressive regimes as Saudi Arabia. In global sports governance, as in inter-governmental relations, money and power rule as they always have and forever will.

Yet if we might briefly take refuge from the realpolitik by slipping into an alternate universe, there we find the Bizarro World Fifa opting to vacate the chasm between the noble mission statements and how it actually does business where the nauseating hypocrisies thrive. In that fantasyland, it would nimbly sidestep all the corruption scandals and humiliations visited on it by the unpredictable course of events by giving the World Cup a permanent home.

The country selected for the honour would be required to pass certain tests. It would need a temperate summer climate in which, unlike Qatar’s, it is not possible to chargrill a bison to a medium rare finish by placing it on the halfway line, lightly salted, for two minutes and 17 seconds.

It would not qualify if, like Russia, it used its legal system to discriminate against gay people, and assassinated former intelligence agents by gingering up cups of cha in a London hotel with recherche radioactive isotypes.

To avoid accusations of unfair home advantage, it must be a country with no realistic chance of ever winning the competition, but with a first world infrastructure that negates any pressure to flatten favelas and a record of successfully holding a previous World Cup.

Above all, it would need to be a byword for neutrality in a dementedly partisan world.

I think you see where this is heading. In this utopian vision, the eternal right to host the World Cup would go to Switzerland, the host nation of 1954. The special charm of this master plan is that Blatter’s reputation would preclude any suspicion that he somehow fixed the decision in the interests of his homeland.

Sadly the competition could not be awarded to Scotland, for all its myriad charms which have been showcased during this week’s Commonwealth Games, because the climate is famously too broiling hot to allow good football and it is facing an uncertain future as a post-secession power.

Back in the real world, meanwhile, you wonder to which paradigm of good and moral governance Fifa will see fit to award the 2026 tournament.

The sadness is that, under a new system debarring continents which have hosted either of the previous two competitions, not only Europe but Asia is disqualified from contesting the bid. This rules out North Korea, the obvious front-runner.

Presently, the only confirmed bidders are Canada, Mexico and Colombia, with the United States and Morocco thought likely to join them.

Is there still time for Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe to throw its hat into the ring?